Faber Goldfaber

With a name like ‘Goldfaber’, it naturally springs to my mind that maybe this would be something special. Having a peek at the Faber webpage though, it would seem this is a student drawing and sketching pencil. As we have reviewed before, I think the Castell 9000 is probably the top of the line pencil.

The company

We’ve covered Faber elsewhere already.

The pencil itself

The pencil is quite nicely finished - a nice blue mostly, with gold highlights.

It has a nicely rounded end with a good dip.

I’m not sure what wood the pencil is (I don’t remember if I gave it the cedar ‘sniff test’, nor thus the results…), but I don’t remember it having any sharpening issues.

How does it write

Ah, and here is the rub. This is a classically ‘hard’ German style pencil. Far too hard for me. Normally I manage to use a pencil for a whole week, but this was vaguely driving me a little nuts. It was barely leaving a mark on the page. I gave up after a couple of days, and moved on.

Sorry Fabergold, you are just not the pencil for me.

Sourcing

I don’t remember where this came from. I think I have a small multi-pack. It is the sort of thing I would have expected to maybe have gotten in WHSmiths, but a quick internet search shows that this is not that commonly or easily available in the U.K. afaict. So, there is atrong chance I picked this up whilst on some travels.